Pad Thai.

Growing up in Utica doesn’t exactly expose you to food from around the world. Although my mom is an amazing cook, she never made Thai food. In fact, I don’t think I even tried Thai food until I was, like, 23 years old. Plus, there’s really only 1 or 2 Thai restaurants in Albany (unlike in the East Village NYC where there’s a Thai restaurant on every corner). And call me weird, but I haven’t been to Thailand. So I don’t think it’s crazy that I don’t know a lot about Thai food.

I had dinner at a Thai restaurant (Holy Basil) the other night in the East Village with my friend JP. Oh wait, let me first say this: I am a creature of habit. I eat the same 10 things over and over and over. When I go out for Thai food, I always get the same exact thing: Red Curry with Chicken (kang ped). If I’m feeling zany, I might get shrimp instead of chicken. So, I barely look at the menu because I go there craving kang ped. And that’s what I order. Every time.

So when I sat down with JP, he threw me for a loop and said, “do you want to get something to share?” (I hate sharing food. If you want to share my food, let’s just order 2 of them.) He suggested that we get Pad Thai to start. And I said, “what’s Pad Thai?”. You would have thought I asked, “what’s pizza?” because he came back at me with a fury of confusion. “WHAT’S PAD THAI!?!?!?!?!??!?!!? YOU’RE KIDDING ME!” I was like, “calm down. what is it?”. Apparently everyone on earth has heard of Pad Thai except for me. Now, anytime JP wants to make me feel stupid in front of other people he’ll say, “…and get this… Matt’s never heard of Pad Thai.” It’s so annoying.

I consider myself to be relatively cultured and feel that I’m pretty familiar with food from around the world (I’ve been to IHOP), so it does surprise me a little bit that I didn’t know what Pad Thai was. So, I thought I should ask around and see if JP was just acting like a food snob, or if everyone does in fact know what Pad Thai is. As much as I hate to admit it, JP was right. Everyone knows what Pad Thai is. Literally every single person I asked was like, “of course”. It’s weird. Where have you been all my life, Pad Thai?